María González is a London-based creative producer, facilitator, and founder of Lon-art, established in 2010 and rebranded as SHEROES Collective in 2025. With a background in Art History and art education, María has dedicated her career to creating a platform for social change, passionately campaigning against all forms of gender-based violence, and advocating for a rethinking of women’s representation in both historical and contemporary visual culture. She firmly believes in the power of activist art to shift perceptions and is committed to amplifying the work of women activist artists as a means to drive this transformative work.

In this interview with DDA, we delve into the need for projects like SHEROES that spotlight violence against women and girls, their ongoing problems with social media suppression and removals, and what it means to give a platform to unseen artists.

Hi María! Thank you so much for taking the time to tell us about SHEROES! First of all, to introduce the DDA community to your project from the beginning, please tell us what your intention has been with SHEROES? Who is it intended to platform, and who is its intended audience?

SHEROES Collective is an arts organisation that celebrates women and raises awareness about gender-based violence and women’s representation. Through the work of women activist artists, we spark vital conversations and inspire action toward gender equality.

Our platform is specifically intended to elevate the work of women activist artists (including trans women and non-binary people) while addressing social issues that impact women. We also share inspiring stories from organisations and individuals who align with our values and mission.

We collaborate with public institutions, organisations, and educational settings to bring feminist art and social conversations to wider audiences. For the general public—especially those interested in feminism, art, and social change—our initiatives aim to inspire engagement, reflection, and action. Ultimately, SHEROES is about building a community where art and activism intersect to create meaningful dialogue and progress.

You've said to me, "Visual conversations make it easier to engage in difficult or uncomfortable conversations." What do you mean by that?

Nowadays, most of the information we consume comes from social media, especially through images and videos. For younger generations, this has become their primary way of engaging with the world, connecting with others, and expressing themselves.

Art has always played a similar role—communicating ideas, social status, power, propaganda, beliefs, and behaviors. In today’s visually driven culture, art continues to hold a unique power: it conveys complex ideas and emotions without relying on words. Art acts as a universal language, one that inspires thought, fosters dialogue, and sparks real change.

When art is created to fight injustice, raise awareness, and encourage critical thinking, it becomes a catalyst for action. People see it, talk about it, and, eventually, they may act on it. That’s the power of visual conversations—they make difficult or uncomfortable topics more accessible, relatable, and impactful.

This is why our work centers on women activist artists. Gender violence, in any form, is a tough topic to confront. To rethink history and the inherited consequences of women’s invisibility, as well as the gendered imbalance of power, leaves us with no choice but to resist, fight back, and reinvent society. We need to amplify these voices, make them visible, and reclaim space for change.

However, being aware of one’s rights and the injustices ingrained in society is not easy—it feels like carrying a heavy burden. At the same time, for those who hold privilege, it may provoke fear, resistance, or discomfort. True change requires bravery, commitment, and collective action.

All the above are valid feelings and they need to be discussed, and art makes things easier.

By platforming artists who may be at a disadvantage due to their identity and subject matter, what do you hope to achieve within the art world? Have you seen your efforts make an impact? If so, how so?

As a small organisation, our impact within the commercial art world may seem modest, but we believe our work provides immense value to the art and artists we support. This value isn’t driven by commercial success but by the power of art to spark change and challenge perceptions. We focus on using art as a language for social change and advocacy, addressing issues that go beyond market trends.

The primary reason we work exclusively with women, trans women, and non-binary artists is to counterbalance the centuries of underrepresentation and lack of visibility for women in the art world. Men have historically had access to platforms, and the art world remains largely white and male-oriented. While women artists are finally trending a gaining more solo exhibitions in contemporary art, the reality is that for centuries, women’s art was confined to the margins. Before the 20th century, women artists were so few that you could count them on one hand, and even today, women’s work is often relegated to the basement of museums. The fact that art history largely ignores this reality is a deep, ongoing wound that academia is reluctant to address.

As a collective, we aim to provide care, support, sisterhood, and empowerment for our artists, helping them achieve their dreams on their own terms. The impact we’re striving for is to see our artists thrive—creating, connecting, and continuing to work with us. It’s a symbiotic relationship that grows and sustains over time.

Since launching Sheroes, we’ve seen our community of artists expand, exhibit in major venues, collaborate with each other outside of our collective, and return to us for ongoing projects. This is a testament to the meaningful impact we’ve had in supporting and amplifying their voices.

Your Instagram account was taken down, please tell us the events leading up to it and what you lost.

We launched the SHEROES project in 2018, and Instagram served as an archive for our work. After taking a pause in 2020, we resumed activity last summer, posting about our return, artist call-outs, and a mural festival collaboration in Colombia. We also shared reposts about gender-based violence and genocide, though none of these were original content from our account.

The takedown happened after we shared a repost about a tragic case of a woman murdered by her husband. Strangely, other accounts that shared the same post remained active, and we were left struggling to understand why ours was targeted. We received no warning and were unable to appeal the decision.

While our account had 1.2k followers—perhaps small in numbers—it represented a carefully curated community and archive of our projects and the work of our artists. Rebuilding that presence has felt like starting from scratch. The loss has made us rethink how we approach social media as a tool for advocacy and visibility. For now, we’ve shifted our focus toward building our website as the primary archive and hub for our work.

Losing access to a platform such as Instagram throws such a massive wrench into artistic endeavors - what were your immediate thoughts and concerns? What did they evolve into? Did the loss of the account affect your desire to continue to raise awareness about VAWG through art?

I’ll be honest—it was incredibly upsetting. I felt angry, powerless, and full of questions. I needed to share the experience with my friends and team—it felt like a loss. But at the same time, I felt embarrassed for being so upset over a social media account, especially when I know it’s probably an algorithm making the decision to take it down.

My initial questions were: Why did this happen? Who decides what’s acceptable? Do these decisions even take into account the work of organisations like ours? Are the people making these choices all men? And most importantly, I couldn’t help but wonder: Do we really need these platforms? What alternatives exist? How can we support each other when something like this happens?

Over time, our response evolved. First, we made sure to secure our social media presence, learning more about the Meta suite and social media management tools. We decided to focus more on LinkedIn, Eventbrite, and other platforms that allow us to connect with our audience. We also made the decision that social media wouldn’t be our primary space for sharing—our website would become the main archive for our work. So, we’re now investing our time there rather than on Instagram or Facebook.

We also decided to run a talk about this experience to help spread the word on how others can find support when facing similar challenge While we’d love to completely disengage from Meta platforms because we don’t align with their morals or business practices, we still feel that being absent means we risk invisibility. So, we’re still navigating this dilemma and thinking through our next steps. Let’s see what the future holds.

At DDA, we often hear artists say things like 'we should create our own platform' or 'we should leave' (referring to major platforms like IG). I've often felt torn about these impulses, because I worry that by leaving, we are allowing marginalized voices to be pushed out of critical spaces. But staying is clearly a fight that not every artist should have to participate in. How can we balance these needs and desires for a platform, and safe and productive environments for marginalized artists? Do we really need social media at all?

I agree with you, and I’ve often imagined having a benevolent backer who could create a platform that isn’t driven by profit or controlled by those power. I believe alternatives will come over time, and they need to be created. I see this as a form of resistance against the current system of manipulation.

If we used social media just to communicate—without the pressure to sell, buy, or follow influencers who have no real understanding of the impa they have on young people—then maybe we could reclaim its value. The obsession with irrelevant lifestyle content, only distracts us from more meaningful exchanges.

While there are platforms designed for artists to connect within their own networks, they aren’t accessible to everyone. The more we rely on major platforms, the more we fuel our dependence on them—and that limits our ability to bring about real change.

The real question is: should this fight come at the expense of artist activists, and marginalised voices? Should it be their burden to bear, when the system is inherently stacked against them?

What is SHEROES Collective, now? What are your intentions, and how can the DDA community support them?

SHEROES Collective is evolving into a platform with a focus on long-term projects. We’ve recently launched SHEROES Thursdays, a series of online talks happening on the first Thursday of each month, where we hold important conversations with artists and activists.

We also have SHEROES Interventions, a project dedicated to bringing activist art into public spaces to spark dialogue on the critical issues we’ve been discussing.

Looking ahead, our goal is to continue growing our artist community, creating a library of resources to support them, and eventually developing an online gallery that amplifies their voices and work.

The DDA community can support us—and similar organisations or artists—by:

• Keeping us informed about developments in the social media landscape and sharing tips to navigate its racist and misogynistic censorship policies.

• Proposing and collaborating on alternative platforms where we can step away from the “tech giants” from time to time.

• Building a network of empathy and care, where affected artists and organisations can find understanding and suppor

• And lastly, spreading the word about us—help us grow our reach and community! Your support and collaboration can help us continue to challenge injustice, foster connection, and sustain the critical conversations we all care about.

Thank you, María, for speaking with DDA!

We look forward to our event together on February 6th as part of SHEROES Thursdays!

You can follow SHEROES at @sheroes_collective on Instagram , on Eventbrite, and on LinkedIn